Well I have been reading about it for a couple of weeks now and I was starting to get anxious. Everybody was having the yellow van pull up and drop a box or two off, but none was in sight in West Michigan. Finally, over the horizon there was a flash, could it be? There it was, that magical yellow van that had eluded us so many times in days past was now pulling in the driveway to make a delivery. Now we finally have the latest release of SolidWorks in our system, this time only in the DVD form. As most of you loyal readers know I have been using SolidWorks 2008 already, but there is just something about having the hard copy of it in your grasp. So if you haven’t seen the magical yellow delivery van pull up yet, just wait it is coming. Maybe it will help to leave some milk and cookies by the door!

With baseball’s Fall Classic right around the corner I thought it would be an ideal time to point out some of the minor features that SolidWorks hit a home run with in their 2008 version of the software. When there are as big of changes as there is in SolidWorks 2008 it is sometimes the smaller things that prove to be the biggest time saving additions to the software. One of these enhancements that I found to be a tremendous time saver was the fact that if you have a part or an assembly that has multiple configurations there are times when you would like to view these configurations all in the sectioned state. If in SolidWorks 2007 you sectioned a configuration and then switched to another configuration, it would set the display state to being a “full” view (not sectioned) again. You would then need to section the configuration again and do all of this all over again when you switched to another configuration. In SolidWorks 2008 it works so that the section acts within the file it seems, not within the configuration. If you select the Section View button, it stays sectioned (no matter what configuration you are in) until you unselect the Section View button. Another enhancement that is more of a preferential liking than a time saver is the fact that you can alter the length of your leader lines in drawings. This was more of a pet peeve of ours that got addressed than anything else. Have you ever had it where you needed to add a leader line to something and the way it was set up you just couldn’t fit it in anywhere nicely? Now you should be able to drag that leader all over the sheet until you find room to place it. These little things are perfect examples why it is worth submitting Enhancement Requests through the SolidWorks Customer Portal. It is people like you and I, the users, that have a significant impact on what new features or enhancements will be rolled out in the next service pack or the next major release. So, keep up the good work, SolidWorks is getting better and better with every release in my opinion and that is because of you.